Life Less Literary

Drove behind a Bentley today (yeah, a Bentley. In Sheffield. Not only that, in Pitsmoor of all places) - its number-plate was FIL 1969 (actually I think FIL I969, but that’s obviously not what it was meant to look like). For some reason my mind started thinking in Latin - Filis-Filial-Filius, something along those lines. A son is born. In 1969. That’s me, that is!

Something very strange has happened to my computer over the last couple of days - it’s lost the ability to notice double-clicks. Well, not quite lost: if I go into the mouse control panel and slow down the double-click speed to the very slowest setting, it can just about pick up very speedy double-clicks, but even this is a bit erratic.

Normally I would put this down to experience and a side-effect picked up somewhere down the line of installing dozens of snippets of software from various sources. However, I was just chatting to Guy and he mentioned that exactly the same thing had happened to him, also during the last couple of days.

I hesitate to cry “virus”, because I know I’m fairly well protected and, mass software insallations aside, relatively careful, but it does seem like pretty obscure behaviour for both our machines to pick up at the same time.

Anyone else ever hear of anything like this?

Lola’s 1^st birthday yesterday. Nothing much special doing - nursery in the morning, moaning for most of the afternoon. We’re having a bit of a party for her on Saturday (jelly and ice-cream for the kids, curry for the grown-ups), but in the meantime I made her a birthday cake - chocolate, at Gill’s request, though I don’t think she realised quite how chocolatey chocolate meant. Nigella, of course, for the recipe - here’s a very similar one (the picture looks almost identical to what I made). The recipe was called “Sour-cream chocolate cake with sour-cream icing”. It may just as well have been called death in the afternoon. Equal amounts of sugar, flour and butter went into the cake, chocolatized with cocoa and moistened with eggs and sour cream (except I didn’t have any - made do with a mixture of creme fraiche and double cream, which no doubt made it even deadlier). And then for the icing…. ahh, the icing. So rich, and Soooooo much of it. 80g dark chocolate, 80g milk chocolate, melted down with a wodge of butter, creamed up with some more cream-mix, pasted-up with a whopping 300g of icing sugar and a dollop of golden syrup for good luck. Oooh. It was heaven. And, did I mention, there was Soooooo much of it. Splattered it all over the cake - in between the 2 sandwich halves, over the top, and plenty left over to goo around the sides, and dollop some more on top, and spread it and flick it around, and lick spoons and bowls, and….

They say the proof of the pudding’s in the eating. Wow! I was a bit worried that I’d left it in the over slightly too long (why is life never simple - the crappy old gas ovens we used to have in rented accomodations always used to need twice as long as listed in a recipe. Then when we moved in with the Aga it was bliss, but of course, no recipe caters for Agas so lots of trial and error. Now we have this electric fan-oven jobby, and everything needs to be sped-up and cooled down). Actually, burning the edges slightly just added to the perfection - a lovely touch of crispy caramel just inside the gooey chocolate icing. And the icing was heaven - a hint of hazelnuts, even though no nuts went into the recipe. And the whole thing was so rich - well, we had to give a third of it away today, because I keep inadvertantly eating slices and then finding myself unable to move for 2 hours (hence death in the afternoon. And morning. Evening too).

I’m kick-starting my proper journalism career with a feature for FAD-MAG on Intelligent textiles. Was about to get started when… I realised I had nothing to tape my interviewees with. Well, OK, I have an old dictation machine somewhere, but no tapes. And I have a computer, of course. So I tried hooking Cool Edit 2000 up to my phone… bummer, the phone doesn’t do hands-free (it only does “monitor” which lets me listen but not talk). So… a bit of ingenuity and experimentation with various freebie microphones I have picked up over the years - finally I came up with this contraption. Thank goodness I hung on to this old Apple Mac microphone (perfect shape for taping to things - not quite a PMZ, but it will serve) when we cleared out the G-Spot offices. Tape it to the phone receiver and… voila! Your conversations tapped and taped with perfect clarity!